News Media Obsesses over Michael Jackson

On Thursday, June 25, I tuned in to the Fox TV news with Bret Baier, expecting to hear the opening line, “Welcome to Washington.” Instead, Fox was broadcasting images of emergency medical activity in Los Angeles, along with Baier’s announcement that Fox had suspended “political news” because Michael Jackson had fallen to cardiac arrest.

At first it seemed an eccentricity on Fox’s part. When broadcaster Shepard Smith came on the air and exclaimed that “no one alive” in the early Eighties could fail to know the lyrics of a certain Michael Jackson tune, I supposed the station must be a nest of Jackson fanatics.

But it was no different anywhere else. Quite abruptly, the momentous events of our day — the mass uprising in Iran, the global economic crisis, nuclear threats from North Korea, political warfare in Congress — had yielded, like the Red Sea’s waters, to what people were calling the most traumatic piece of news since JFK’s assassination and 9/11.